It’s easy to think of a well-funded factory full of the best automotive talent like Ferrari making a race car. But it’s certainly more compelling—romantic even—to think of a family artfully transforming little Fiats into pocket rockets by hand.

This is why you visit the Stranguellini Museum in Modena. It’s the art with which cars were made.

You may be startled to learn that “Stanguellini is certainly the oldest Modenese name to be active in the car field since 1900.”

And you’ve never heard of them, right?

Let’s take a look at what you’ll see if you make a reservation to visit this free Museum.

Strangellini Collection: Barchetta 1000 bodied by Ala d'Oro

The cars in front of the divider where the cars the Stranguellini raced. Behind them are the cars they’ve used and acquired over time, like the Alfa below.

Blue Alfa, Stranguelini Museum

There are over thirty race cars in the collection. But that’s not all. There are the tools and machines that made the parts, an ingot that would be turned into a crankshaft and then polished like a jewel:

Crankshaft Turning Art

You’ll learn that family had many racing victories in very small engined cars. Stanguellini race cars were always minimal. A worker who could take a kilo of weight out of a car without consequence was paid something like 20,000 lira.

A mid-mounted Moto Guzzi engine was stuffed inside an air-slick body and called the Colibrì. The 248 cc, 1 cylinder engine propelled the car to land speed records for the classification at Monza.

The work is extraordinary.

Weber Carburetors: Stranguellini Museum

Visiting the Stranguellini Museum

You can pay 17 euro to see the Ferrari museum in Maranello, but the Stranguellini is easy to visit and it’s free when you make an appointment. If you like to see fast cars with small motors made by hand, this is the place you’ll want to visit.

]]>James Martin2019-05-20T14:54:59Z2019-05-20T16:39:35ZFeasting at the Officina della Bisteccatag:www.wanderingitaly.com,2019-05-20:37052c84f933e83406cc6d5dcae6b0b4/8204cbf016235ac8aca731ea2badc206Feasting at the Officina della Bistecca

I’m going to tell you a tale of celebrating life while eating meat. Our meal starts with Pinzimonio, vegetables to save your meat-eating soul, and slides toward a finish with big hunks of bistecca, beefsteak, which we would likely call the T-Bone.

If you watch any foodie television show in the universe, you know the Dante Quoting Butcher of Panzano, Dario Cecchini. He’s an advocate of primitive feasting, a devotee of Dante, a Tuscan who buys his cattle from Spain, and a man who longed to recreate the big family meals he ate with his father’s business associates and assorted friends.

Mr Ceccchini’s little corner of Panzano might be thought of as a university of cow studies. The place jumps with tourists during the day, then becomes quieter as folks find (not without some difficulty) the room of the restaurant they’ve reserved. One Dario restaurant, Solociccia, is devoted to the cuts of beef you need to spend considerable time with to make them soft enough for consumption. It’s to teach you what to do with all the other cuts folks don’t come to his butcher shop for, but are big on flavor once you know what to do with them. After all, the butcher can’t keep hacking off beefsteaks for all the customers without selling the rest.

Then there’s the Officina della Bistecca. That’s for the high-spenders who really want to dabble in the prime cuts of grass fed beef but don’t want to have to dress up to get it. One long table dominates the room, with a couple of huge grills in the center of one wall, bathrooms opposite. You feast together. You get to know your neighbors. You get to laugh at them when they try to find the bathrooms.

When you arrive you’ll see the big beef spread out on a block in the center of the table. Bowls of fennel and carrot share space with the olive oil and fiascos of ordinary wine, the kind the country folk guzzle. You may be seated firmly in the heart of prime Chianti country, but not everyone here can afford the pricey, international grape squeezings that Chianto Classico farmers can turn into gold. Not at a meal of prime cuts, one after another, that costs a mere 50 euros out the door anyway. If you really have to have snazzy wine, you can bring your own, there’s no corkage fee.

I won’t bore you with the many courses.You can find them listed on the website. But the last one—that one is the special one. Dario comes out with the clown trumpets attached to his belt and does the thing you see on his shows where he blasts you with sound and announces the bistecca. The crowd, as they say, goes nuts. This is theater, folks, the best kind. And the popcorn has been replaced by real food.

Forget what you know about fine dining. Use your hands. Rip into that steak, canines ablaze. You’ve already left your worries in the street, the wine took care of that. We witnessed an Aussie food fight during our meal. I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend that but nobody got arrested.

I will also ask that you forget another thing. Long cooking times. The steak is served rare. You might get away with asking for it medium-rare, but there’s a vegetarian menu for the rest of you. The meat is grass fed. It doesn’t have the inter-muscular fat of a cow fed on what it doesn’t like to eat, say corn. So you’ll be chewing for a week of Sundays if you order it overdone.

Dario Cecchini with people from all over.

Cows. From Spain?

Ok, so over the years you know that Dario has been kind of a stickler at times for authentic Tuscan local cuisine. So what’s with the cows from Spain thing? (You’ll be happy to know that a guy named Zach Nowak from Harvard has studied this phenomenon, and it’s from a guest lecture at Connecticut College that the quotes below are drawn.)

I asked Dario why he didn’t use local beef, and I could tell by his expression that it was the millionth time a locavore had put that question to him. “I could have local beef here in my shop and restaurant. I could buy local cows and have maybe not mile zero meat, but maybe two-mile meat. But that’s the problem: it’s two-mile meat, but what about the grain to make it?” The problem, as Dario explained to me, is that Chianti is Italy’s most famous type of wine. I’ll ask you: if you owned four acres of land in Chianti, would you pasture five or six cows, or makes several thousand bottles of Chianti wine? Four acres of wine grapes can make someone a lot more money than four acres of pasture.

So the thing is, if Dario had gotten his cows from locals, he’d have to import grain to feed them. Lots of grain. So…cue the vegetarians who’d jump into the orchestra pit and have their way with folks who’d use perfectly edible grain to feed cattle inefficiently.

To avoid the endless battle, let’s admit that the cow wants abundant pasturage to eat like it was born to eat. Grasses that we don’t have to eat until the next crash of the economy. Grain fed beef? Harumph.

Where is this grain from? From the Great Plains of Canada, the US, Argentina, and even India. Your cows are local, but all that grain they’re eating is not. And grain is an energy-intensive food. While a grass pasture doesn’t have to be plowed, planted, fertilized, or harvested, growing grain is an incredibly oil-intensive process. We think of a vegetarian diet based on cereals as more natural and low-energy, but I can tell you that growing grain the way we do now needs a lot of energy. Tractors have to plow the land, plant the seeds, fertilize, and harvest. That requires a lot of fossil fuels.

We don’t usually think about this, but a grass-fed animal can be an incredibly sustainable meal. Cecchini’s cows in Catalonia eat grass eleven months a year. This is what we want our meat production to look like. ~ The Myth of Eat Local: The Case of Tuscan Butcher Dario Cecchini.

Officina della Bistecca, the Bottom Line

Our party of six was well-satisfied with the meal, the theater, and the three and a half hour lunch.

Y’all go out and have yourselves a heapin’ helpin’ of sustainable hedonism, ok?

]]>James Martin2019-04-29T16:51:16Z2019-05-04T09:11:44ZDo You Need a Private Guide?tag:www.wanderingitaly.com,2019-04-29:37052c84f933e83406cc6d5dcae6b0b4/dcaf99c92bdad6c9d4d8983c3d446a41We were two couples, sharing a fantastic apartment in Milis, Sardinia. It was a very nice little village with two butchers, a shop that sold homemade pasta and pastries, several bars and a pizzeria which we never found because it was so pleasant to make our own food in the house’s well-stocked kitchen.

I knew the area. Heck, I knew the mayor of nearby Bauladu, a place I’d worked as an archaeologist in the 1980s, excavating Nuraghe Santa Barbara, just outside town. We didn’t need no stinkin’ guide, I was the guide.

Then my friend Paola Loi came to visit for a day. She’s a guide who gives private tours. We wrote an app together about Sardinia. The company who published the app went out of business. I’m pretty certain it wasn’t our fault.

So the first thing we do upon Paola’s arrival is run around town picking up little things that are good to eat. Paola looks at the glass case in a macceleria and starts a stream-of-consciousness thing, meandering through the unique flavors of her island while a suckling pig glares at us from the glass case. Soon we leave with a hunk of salami that’s cured with vinegar. It’s OMG good. I wouldn’t have known.

So we ate a feast of all the things we’d foraged in Milis. Then we tried walking off the calories. We’d heard that in unlikely named Palazzo Boyl in the main square there was some kind of museum so we tromped toward it. Then Paola stops a guy dead in his tracks and asks him if he knows anything about it. No dice. He says the museum isn’t open much. But—this guy is getting out some keys. He’s planning on going in. “Can we just see inside?” Paola begs.

“I just have a couple of minutes,” the man answers, “But I can let you in”

He can let us in because he’s the mayor, we find out. His name is Sergio Vacca.

Paola immediately engages him. They talk about Sardinia like it’s some classic Italian car they both remember from their childhoods, a sleek but clunky beast that holds great memories. After quite a bit of walking and gawking we’re worming our way in to the far reaches of the palazzo, the place where the mayor brings special guests and has placed some special art of the island to create a favorable cultural atmosphere. Who needs a museum? History and art surrounds us.

Walter Sanders makes eyes at the Sardinian art in the Palazzo Boyl

Walter Sanders, the master of art interaction, leads us further into the story of a day in Milis:

Sergio’s couple of minutes to spare stretched to nearly two hours. He also had the keys to the Romanesque church of San Paolo and he gave us a grand tour there. ~ Milis in Sardinia

Sergio Vacca, the mayor of Milis, discusses the Romanesque church with guide Paola Loi.

Then we strolled to the orange garden, and past it to another locked gate the mayor opened for us. beyond the gate we found Milis’ past glory waiting to be made into…perhaps a hotel—and the largest, ugliest bomb shelter you could imagine.

By the end of the day we had seen all of Milis—it’s past, present, and even vestiges of what might become its future. A good, engaging guide can do that for you, even in places you’ve never heard of.

You don’t need a “stop of the car, roll down the windows, get a rote paragraph of explanation thrown at you” kind of guide, you need one that has the keys or knows who to ask to unlock the doors and gates.

Yeah, the gang certainly appreciated the effort.

The gang: happy in Milis

How to Have a Milis Vacation

We stayed at the this fabulous house in Milis. If you like to cook, its well-stocked kitchen will wow you.

What can you see in a short drive from Milis? Well, there’s Sardinia’s best off-ramp attractions, Santa Cristina. To the west is the awesome Sinis Peninsula with Roman, Punic, and Nuragic ruins, Romanesque Churches, the Giants of Monte Prama, and fine beaches.

]]>James Martin2019-04-11T09:07:36Z2019-04-13T19:27:43ZSarzanatag:www.wanderingitaly.com,2008-09-16:37052c84f933e83406cc6d5dcae6b0b4/a60a55354d5e81a1bcef6022283ac9beSarzana is a quietly spectacular town. It lies in Liguria on the border with Tuscany. The Magra river passes to the east. The sea is a short distance away.

Tourists don’t go there much. Italian tourists might peek into some of the antique shops in the historic center, once a major draw in Sarzana but now a sideline ever since giant antique fairs started to play out in the bigger cities. Today it’s a quiet city.

Here’s the major piazza, Piazza Matteotti, on a recent Wednesday. A storm approaches, but the light is always good in Sarzana. It’s hard to take a bad picture of this city.

Sarzana: Piazza Matteotti

There are many restaurants in Sarzana, and all of them are good. It’s like the town is waiting for tourists who seldom come. We go there quite a lot, sometimes for the Thursday market, but mostly just to join the evening passeggiata and do a little shopping.

And, of course, Sarzana has a nice castle. Two in Fact. La Cittadella Fortezza Firmafede is right on the northeast border of the old town and the Fortezza di Sarzanello is just north of town. but you can see it way off on the top of the hill as you gaze at the Fortezza Firmafede in front of you and squint a bit at the horizon.

Sarzana's two castles, one in town, one on the hill behind.

It also has a fine Romanesque/Gothic cathedral, Basilica Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta. The cathedral was built as the seat of the Bishop of Luni, a nearby town from which marble was shipped and for which the Lunigiana was named. The current building took from 1204 to 1474 build, and in 1735 three statues of popes were added to the top of the façade.

The Cross of Maestro Guglielmoin the Cathedral of Sarzana (1138) serves as the oldest extant example of a monumental painted panel (dipintura) cross. This crucifix portrays Jesus as the Christus Triumphans. In this format of depicting the crucifixion, Jesus appears immune to suffering and death. He stands against the cross fully alive (despite the spear wound); his eyes are open and his face devoid of emotion. ~ The Painted Panel Crucifixes of the Early Franciscans as a Response to the Cathar Heresy

The Cross of Maestro Guglielmo in the Cathedral of Sarzana (1138)

Where to Eat in Sarzana

Among the plethora of fine restaurants in Sarzana we find ourselves returning to L’Osteria dei Sani. Our latest meal was quite spectacular, including a pasta with fresh anchovies, a crunchy fritto misto di mare and perfectly seared tuna, as shown below.

Fritto Misto Mare and Tuna from Osteria dei Sani, Sarzana.

Where is Sarzana?

Sarzana is 15 minutes east of La Spezia, the “gateway to the Cinque Terre”, on the train, and a little over 2 hours from Florence on the train passing through the marble country of Massa and Carrara.

Atri Fioriti

The uniguely Sarzana festival called Atri Fioriti, flowered atriums, is held around the May 1st holiday every year. Each year the city opens the doors of it’s stately palazzi to visitors, where they’ll find atriums decorated with a different them every year. Last year celebrated the historic cars of the Mille Miglia.

More Articles About Liguria and the Italian Riviera

]]>James Martin2019-03-11T19:27:33Z2019-03-11T21:10:04ZA Gorge Adventure in the Lunigianatag:www.wanderingitaly.com,2019-03-11:37052c84f933e83406cc6d5dcae6b0b4/6999e874e996995211f5b817f3099163My descriptions of the historical territory of La Lunigiana in northern Tuscany tend to drift toward the tranquil beauty of mountains and valleys, the idyllic countryside that brings us a variety of good things to eat.

But there is adventure here, too, in the place I make my Italian home. Places where the earth cracks and exposes a colorful center. A river runs through it. Call it a fluvial gorge. Take a guided trip. Learn things you never knew before from a hidden corner of Tuscany.

Pontremoli is a beautiful medieval village wedged between Magra and Verde rivers. It’s a major stop along the Via Francigena in the northern part of the Lunigiana in Northern Tuscany and is one of the larger towns of the Lunigiana. It’s famous for its Stele Statue Museum housed in the Castello del Piagnaro, a great attraction with fine views of the valley formed by the two rivers.

Zeri is a loose conglomeration of tiny hamlets to the west of Pontremoli, known for its Zeri Lamb, a product whose artisan production methods haven’t changed in a great long while.

You can find out about how to reach and enjoy Stretti di Giaredo from the great website that’s been recently uploaded. The English side of the site is fine, and you can find out what natural things you can do while hiking and swimming the straits.

…thanks to a growing attention caused by social networks and by the spread of beautiful pictures, over recent years they have been visited by an increasingly large number of tourists, especially during the warmer months of the year.

Yes, there seem to be way more tourists these days and they’re bent on taking bits of things they’ll probably never look at again, like pieces of rock wall, ancient pot sherds, and other things that can land you in jail if you get caught.

I like the idea of telling folks how they should behave. The experience is the thing. Take all the photos you like. Leave everything for the next person to gawk at. On the other hand, what can it hurt to take a little something home as a memento?

Here’s something that’s astounding. Folks take sand in Sardinia home in plastic bottles. How much sand could be missing?

In three summer months in 2015 alone, as much as five tonnes of sand was seized at Elmas airport, local reports say. Sand was also seized at the island’s other airports in Alghero and Olbia. Steal Sardinia’s Sand and Face a Fine

And that’s just what they found!

The nice thing about the behavior page is that it isn’t just a boring list of rules you look at and forget. It’s all explained to you.

It can happen, if you are a careful observer, to see particular white formations which slide along the wall imitating the stalactites: they are calcareous concretions which grow very slowly and their structures are extremely fragile. Observe the secular work of the water dripping, but without influence it: do not lean, do not touch and do not remove these formations.

If you wish to do this tour right, then I highly recommend the guided tour, because there’s so much you’ll want to know about the unique aspects of this site. The guides, according to a variety of online sources, are fabulous.